Cape employers don’t need H2Bs to import labor from nearby cities

Friday

Mar 27, 2009 at 2:00 AM

When he was a kid during the Great Depression, Uncle Luke was a mule – but the folks on the greens called him a caddy. He used to hitchhike from Fall River to Osterville to heave and haul on his small back the golf bags of the idle rich.

Paul Gauvin

When he was a kid during the Great Depression, Uncle Luke was a mule – but the folks on the greens called him a caddy. He used to hitchhike from Fall River to Osterville to heave and haul on his small back the golf bags of the idle rich.

As a hard-times teenager, he was, as most, open to any opportunity that came his way and so he vaulted on the pole of necessity from boys’ work to a man’s job with the Civilian Conservation Corps – the original FDR infrastructure bailout plan – swinging an ax, swatting bugs, eating beans, living in tents in the deep forests and sending the paycheck home to mama. Then a German wallpaper hanger with a mustache and promising elocution gave Uncle Luke a career opportunity. When the U.S. was about to enter WWII, many of the CCC crewmen enlisted in the military, which Uncle Luke was about to do when he received some advice about signing up with the Merchant Marine for a better paycheck. Whoever told him that – I forgot by now and I can’t ask him to remind me because he is in the great big engine room in the sky – neglected to mention that the wallpaper hanger’s wolf packs would be stalking him, quite successfully too in the early days, during the tedious, anxiety-producing Atlantic crossings hauling Johnny and his tanks and trucks and canon to what would turn out to be a sad and solemn burial ground, a repository of young men without future. As luck would have it, his ship was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day. He survived unfazed and remained in the merchant marine until he retired with his lungs damaged beyond repair by the asbestos covering the engine room piping. We are at the point of needing to relive Uncle Luke’s days as a golf go-fer, but the suffering New Bedford and Fall River labor force can’t seem to click with Cape Cod - to the detriment of both. Fall Riverites and New Bedford residents need work, and Cape Cod needs willing workers. What is it that keeps them apart? Why must Cape Cod businesses look to distant lands - Jamaica, Ireland, Bulgaria, Brazil – all considerably farther away than Fall River and New Bedford – to fill their labor needs? In case you haven’t heard, the unemployment rate in Fall River, 50 or so miles away, has reached 16 percent and climbing, and one wonders now if the young people there are considering hitchhiking to Cape Cod to find employment during the prime tourist season as did Uncle Luke. Probably not. We are left to wonder why, with a modern new highway, with buses available and car-pooling - why it seems to have become so much more difficult to get here from there compared to uncle’s two- to four-hour adventures on the road thumbing rides. Obviously, there’s something lacking when neighbors can’t meet each others’ needs at times like these. Has the blue-blood sense of entitlement trickled down from the palace to the ghetto? What’s this about the lack of sufficient transportation between here and there, about small paychecks not worth the trip? No matter what reasons Cape businesses and the nearby unemployed conjure up, the neutral observer will always ask: “Then how come people from Bulgaria and Jamaica, for God’s sake, can do it and we can’t? What do they have – more pride, more will to survive, what? – that our fellow compatriots and we can’t make it work? Are we really that impotent? Why is it people can commute to and from Boston but not to and from Cape Cod? Highway 307 stretches 300 miles along the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico from Cancun to Belize. You can stand almost anywhere on an 80-mile stretch of that road – from Cancun to Tulum - and within five or 10 minutes catch a ride in one of the numerous “collectivos” – white 12-seater vans that carry workers speedily to and from the job, most in the service industry. And if the van lets them off a mile or two from home or the workplace, they walk. Unlike here, they haven’t forgotten the joy of using one’s legs as an actual means of healthy, invigorating transportation. If U.S. leaders – national, state and local – are serious about putting people to work as they say they are; if they are serious about getting a handle on the recession before it plummets into a depression, they need to find a way to link the unemployed in Southcoast with available seasonal jobs on Cape Cod. It could signal the beginning of the end of the area recession - until the next one comes along.